For the Conservative government, this week’s Throne speech offers an occasion to press the reset button — again. After seven years in office, the Tories need a fresh narrative to take them through to the 2015 election. Already, much of the script is public knowledge: a so-called “Consumers First” Agenda for purchasers of cable television, wireless phones and airline tickets, a focus on jobs and the economy “in uncertain times,” and a reiteration of the family-friendly tax policies that the Tories promised in the last election, including income-splitting.

For the opposition, the Throne Speech is a distraction from their pet issue: the government’s ethical failings. The last few weeks have provided plenty of fresh material: revelations about Senator Mike Duffy allegedly paying friends for little or no work, the release of hundreds of supposedly non-existent emails between Mr. Duffy and Stephen Harper’s former Chief of Staff Nigel Wright, and the resignation from caucus of Conservative MP Dean del Mastro after being charged with election-financing fraud.

Mr. Harper may have thought he was buying time by bringing Parliament back a month later than usual; instead, he allowed more trouble to erupt in time for the House of Commons’ first Question Period. But no matter how aggressive the attacks from the opposition, will they make a difference? Or will the Conservatives succeed in deflecting ethical barbs from across the aisle?

In the short term, the opposition likely will rule the day. While the Throne speech will make a splash of news, both the NDP and Liberals will immediately ignore it and press the government on the issue of reforming or abolishing the Senate. The speech itself will likely go light on that subject, in part because the Supreme Court is currently seized of the issue. But every time opposition parties mouth the word Senate, they draw attention to Conservatives behaving badly, so expect them to continue fanning the flames.

After the Throne speech, watch for Tory ministers to fan out across the country and sell its most populist — and likely popular — provisions: the “Consumers-First” agenda. While income-splitting will not kick in until the budget is balanced, and job creation could be stymied by the provinces, the consumer measures will take effect as soon as they can be rammed through the House. By the time 2015 rolls around, every other middle-class voter will have a story to tell about how they exercised their new “Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights” or stuck it to their wireless company — and they’ll be giving the government a hearty thumbs-up.

In the third quarter of 2013, economic growth fell short of expectations: According to BMO Markets’ Chief Economist Doug Porter, “underlying growth is still just quietly grinding along at a modest pace of between 1.5% and 2%, not enough to meaningfully reduce the jobless rate.” Meanwhile, the Royal Bank lowered its growth projections to 1.8% for 2013, and expects that the economy will only really start rebounding in the first half of 2015, when inflations targets of 2% are achieved.

What could worsen this scenario? Economic woes south of the border. More than ethics, Harper’s true Achilles heel may lie in the U.S. Congress, in the form of the looming debt ceiling and a president who professes no love for the Keystone pipeline. If the elephant we sleep beside rolls over, the Canadian mouse will be crushed.

In such an atmosphere, the opposition parties won’t even need the Senate scandal

A stagnating economy would torpedo the Conservatives’ chances of creating jobs, balancing the books and realizing their promises. In such an atmosphere, the opposition parties won’t even need the Senate scandal: Shredding the Tories’ reputation as competent fiscal managers will be enough, even if Mr. Harper’s plans are undone by the actions of others. The opposition may even try to tie ethics and finances together, making the leap from “you can’t trust them on expenses” to “you can’t trust them on the economy.”

All but seven members of the Conservative caucus voted last Wednesday night against Bill C-398 — Quebec NDP MP Hélène Laverdière’s private member’s bill that aimed to correct Canada’s flawed Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) — sending it to defeat.

Astute observers recognize that, while CAMR 2.0 was an improvement over its predecessor (a similar draft, Bill C-393, passed the House in March 2011 but died on the Senate’s order paper before Parliament was dissolved for the 2011 federal election), it was far from perfect. Yet activists have cried foul, accusing the government of obstreperous cruelty. The reality is more complex.

Canadian generic drug manufacturers face a considerable competitive disadvantage when it comes to the cost of manufacturing medicines. A highly-competitive international market exists for the supply of cheap, generic drugs from developing countries like India, China, Bangladesh and Sudan.

Incentives, like the proposed “one-license solution,” might have invited greater economies of scale and lower production costs, but this wouldn’t necessarily have made Canadian companies more competitive than their rivals — a legitimate concern when contemplating adjustments to the patent protections enjoyed by our brand-name pharmaceutical companies.

Putting these qualifiers aside, let’s say that Bill C-398 would have provided developing countries with more high-quality, lifesaving, Canadian-manufactured generic drugs. Most parties will agree this is good.

But one argument has been absent from this debate: By blocking the legislation, the Conservatives missed an opportunity to promote their “tough on crime” agenda.

Let me explain: I spent much of the past several months tracking down fake and substandard medicines in East Africa and Southeast Asia. Some of the drugs that infiltrate porous borders in these institutionally-weak and poorly-regulated markets are bad by most objective standards; others may only have become bad due to poor environmental storage conditions and practices. Where the former are being produced by unsophisticated, opportunistic hacks, transnational organized criminals increasingly are entering this dangerous space.

In South Sudan, for example, where health systems are extraordinarily fragile, a quick jaunt through any market where drugs are sold reveals the ubiquitous presence of Coartem, the artemisinin-based combination treatment for the uncomplicated strains of malaria found throughout large swathes of the African and Asian sub-continents. Coartem is supplied without profit by Novartis, the Swiss-based pharmaceutical giant — a similar move, one presumes, to the generous donations our own brand-name pharmaceutical companies are in the habit of making.

There’s just one problem: These medicines, intended for public health facilities where drugs and services should be free, are almost always stolen from their intended recipients and diverted to private stores, where they are then sold at marked-up rates most South Sudanese struggle to afford. Companies like Novartis owe no obligation to guarantee their donations are distributed into the hands of their presumed beneficiaries once the goods are transferred to relevant authorities. Yet the benevolent impact of their largesse is being lost.

Of course, there was no suggestion that Bill C-398’s purpose was to obviate this particular concern. But even where access to medicines is a lesser problem, there is a notable absence of high-quality generic drugs, something that Canadian manufacturers may have been able to rectify with improved incentives and less red tape.

Yes, despite the undeserved bad rap that all developing country-manufactured generics are fake, falsified, or substandard, it certainly is possible to purchase high-quality generic medicines. But the often-higher manufacturing standards Canadian pharmaceuticals are held to means there should be substantial appetite for our drugs, and more confidence in the authenticity of our products. Furthermore, the availability and supply of these superior medicines could actually help crowd out the market for poorer-quality substitutes.

Having established a net-benefit through the promotion of increased medicines-access and pharmacovigilance, it becomes difficult to rationalize the Conservative opposition to Bill C-398’s proposed legislation.

This bill wasn’t the fix-all promised. But, in fighting it, the Conservatives have unequivocally said “no” to reforms that wouldn’t have cost taxpayers a dime; may have improved the international competitiveness of our generic manufacturers; could have increased poor countries’ access to our quality, lifesaving medicines; and might have put a dent in the market for dangerous alternatives. Despite the “ifs,” this still was bad politics.

National Post
@JeffMBernstein

Jeffrey Bernstein, a Toronto-based writer and social entrepreneur, spent the summer on the hunt for counterfeit medicines in South Sudan and Myanmar for STATT, a start-up dedicated to mitigating transnational threats and expanding transnational opportunities.

OTTAWA — A Conservative MP whose election was overturned due to numerous voting irregularities is being sent as part of a Canadian observer mission charged with ensuring free and fair elections in Ukraine.

And while Ted Opitz will be part of the mission, at least two former Liberal cabinet ministers have been given the boot.

The makeup of the mission is sparking accusations that the Conservative government is compromising Canada’s international reputation by injecting domestic partisan politics into its staffing of the 500-member team.

The selection of Opitz is drawing particular criticism because of the uncertainty that lingers over his own election victory.

The Supreme Court of Canada is to decide whether Opitz was the actual winner of the Toronto riding of Etobicoke Centre in the 2011 federal election over Liberal incumbent Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

Opitz is appealing a decision by an Ontario Superior Court judge who threw out 79 ballots due to procedural irregularities, nullifying the MP’s narrow 26-vote victory.

If the Supreme Court denies Opitz’s appeal, he would have to square off against Wrzesnewskyj in a by-election in Etobicoke Centre, which has a large Ukrainian-Canadian population. The top court heard the landmark case in early July and is expected to rule on it soon, conceivably while Opitz is in Ukraine.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean KilpatrickLiberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj, middle, with his lawyer Gavin J. Tighe, left at the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa on July 10, 2012. If the Supreme Court denies Opitz’s appeal, he would have to square off against Wrzesnewskyj in a by-election in Etobicoke Centre, which has a large Ukrainian-Canadian population.

While the court case focused on procedural snafus, Wrzesnewskyj has made more serious charges, backed up by affidavits sworn by Elections Canada officials, of voter suppression and intimidation by members of Opitz’s campaign team.

None of those allegations has been proven in court.

Opitz played a prominent role last August when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney — the government’s political point man on wooing ethnic communities — chose the riding next door to Etobicoke Centre to announce the mission.

Meanwhile, former Liberal cabinet ministers Elinor Caplan and David Anderson both received telephone calls earlier this month from Canadem — the independent agency that recruits observers for the federal government — telling them they didn’t make the cut as election monitors.

Obviously, this is seen as very political by the government

“You don’t need to be a genius to figure this out,” Caplan said in an interview. “Obviously, this is seen as very political by the government.”

Caplan, who served as an observer in Belarus and has taken United Nations courses on election monitoring, said she was asked by Canadem to apply. She did and was notified that she was “good to go,” other than the formality of having the minister sign off on her involvement.

Then over the Thanksgiving weekend, Canadem left a message on her home phone advising her that “at the direction of the government of Canada, we’ve been directed to remove you from the delegation.”

She said it appears the government is bumping Liberals while “doing what they can to keep (Opitz) front and centre” with his Ukrainian-Canadian constituents in case he winds up having to fight a byelection.

It tarnishes Canada’s international reputation

“It’s a pity because, you know, it tarnishes Canada’s international reputation … if the message is we’re sending over a partisan, highly unbalanced (delegation) or there are political reasons for who gets selected.”

Anderson received a similar telephone call on the same weekend, and was told he was off the team. He said he has questions, given that he’s very familiar with the practices and policies of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a recognized leader in international monitoring.

“I’m happy to apply for these things. But if I’m always going to get blackballed, I’d like to know that too. Whether it’s my age, my politics, the colour of my eyes.”

As for Opitz taking part in the mission, Anderson said: “It’s a curious choice, given the controversy surrounding his election.”

Taras Zalusky, the mission’s chief of staff, said the selection process “was exactly the same” for this mission as it was when Caplan and Anderson were in cabinet.

It sounds like sour grapes to me

“So, it sounds like sour grapes to me,” Zalusky said.

Zalusky, who has been involved in two earlier Canadem missions to Ukraine, said 1,500 people applied for the 490 available short- and long-term observer spots. Another 10 are reserved for parliamentarians, chosen by their respective parties.

“The delegation is made up of lots of people with all kinds of expertise,” Zalusky said. “There are people who are electoral experts, there are people with language skills, there are people with all kinds of backgrounds.”

However, the mission has raised eyebrows, even among some observers, with the disproportionate number of Ukrainian Canadians who’ve been selected — many of whom, including Zalusky himself, are connected to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), an organization that has been highly critical of Ukraine’s governing party.

One observer, who asked not to be identified, estimated that 50 per cent of Canada’s observers are of Ukrainian heritage.

“It’s hard to imagine they’re objective,” the observer said.

Anderson said it’s understandable that the Ukrainian community in Canada tends to be “more hostile to the Russian party,” but that makes it problematic for members to serve on a supposedly neutral election monitoring mission.

“They tend to be more on one side. That means that Ukrainian Canadians like any other ethnic group in the diaspora of any country are not necessarily accepted by the home country as unbiased.”

Indeed, the diaspora-heavy contingent would seem to be contrary to Canadem’s own guidelines for election monitoring missions.

“Regardless of how impartial and professional an observer is, the perception of bias or conflict of interest is a huge challenge, particularly for observers who are returning to their country of origin,” Canadem says on its website.

“Therefore, in many situations, election observer missions cannot be staffed by observers who originated from the country in which the election is taking place.

“Regardless of how good they are, local voters will assume that they are not impartial. At a minimum, the standard practice is that the number of country-of-origin observers on an international mission must be relatively small.”

Zalusky, who is taking a leave of absence from his job as executive director of the UCC to take part in the mission, dismissed any concerns. “Every single one” of the observers is a Canadian citizen, he said; there are no “new arrivals” from Ukraine.

They have all passed both Canadem and United Nations training courses and must adhere to “a very strict code of conduct on not being biased,” he added.

Moreover, Zalusky argued, it’s an asset that 40 per cent of Canada’s long-term observers, who’ve been in Ukraine for the past two months, speak Ukrainian or Russian.

“Frankly, when you have people on the ground for two months, in order to catch nuance, in order to be able to understand what’s going on in a complex political system like Ukraine — where, as good as they are, interpreters won’t catch everything and sometimes they’re afraid to translate everything — it’s good to have people who actually understand what’s being said.”

Many have been involved in previous election observation missions to Ukraine, added Zalusky, who previously served as an adviser to Liberal ministers as well as chief of staff to Bev Oda, the former Conservative minister of international co-operation.

“I have every confidence that the Canadian observers know that when they go out in the field that they’re representing Canada and that they all behave appropriately,” he said.

“The usual suspects are going to complain about this but I can honestly say that Canadem runs a top-rate operation … They do a first-rate, bang-up job.”

Wrzesnewskyj declined to comment on Opitz’s involvement in the mission, but he defended the heavy involvement of Ukrainian Canadians.

He took credit for persuading former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin to make use of the diaspora in Canada’s first election monitoring mission to Ukraine in 2004, over the objections of Foreign Affairs bureaucrats who worried about objectivity.

Canadem is not involved in choosing the parliamentary contingent. Opitz’s office said he’ll be accompanied by three other Tories: Manitoba MP James Bezan and Toronto-area MPs Wladyslaw Lizon and Corneliu Chisu.

It would be an understatement to say that the announcement that Bob Rae would not be seeking the Liberal party’s permanent leadership caught the media by surprise. There had been a parade of quiet leaks, private conversations and not-so-subtle hints over the last several months that he would indeed be running. Not everyone doing the talking was particularly happy about it, but it seemed clear that Mr. Rae remained very interested in first clearing the obstacles to him seeking the job, then pulling together a team of Liberal insiders and big-shots to organize his campaign.

And then it was all over. The details emerging now suggest that, over the past weekend, Mr. Rae and his wife sat down and really talked out whether he should try for the permanent job. Ultimately, they decided that he should not. Not because politics is hard, not because Mr. Rae is about to turn 64, not because there would be many in the Liberal party who would be outraged that Mr. Rae was running despite having originally said he wouldn’t. All of these issues were apparently discussed. But what really tipped the balance against Mr. Rae running was apparently his conclusion that, even in the medium term, the Liberals simply cannot stage a comeback.

That conclusion won’t come as much of a surprise to many NDP and Tory supporters who have spent the last 13 months cackling with glee at the fall of the once-mighty Liberal party. “Stick a fork in ‘em!” has been the prevailing sentiment in those quarters. But it’s certainly sobering if Mr. Rae himself, the man who took over the (fatally?) wounded Liberal party and gave every indication that he intended to stay in command, decided to give up because after a year at the top, he decided it was a spent force.

These revelations come to us courtesy of the Toronto Star’s inimitable Bob Hepburn, who while never hinting at his sources, seems to have a thorough understanding of how this sudden decision came about. He writes in Thursday’s paper that, after studying the Canadian politician landscape, Mr. Rae and his wife concluded that the best Mr. Rae could hope to achieve was to claim the leadership prize and then cool his heels for at least 11 years before possibly becoming prime minister … in 2023.

Apparently, the Liberals — including Mr. Rae — had held out some hope that the NDP might be a one-hit wonder and fade away, giving the Liberals a shot at either reclaiming official opposition status or maybe, just maybe, capitalizing on Tory mistakes and winning government outright. Such a scenario is seemingly no longer considered likely by the Liberals, who have seen the Tories maintain their core support while the NDP has surged into a statistical deadheat with the government. For the Liberals to go anywhere anytime soon would require not only the government to drop the ball spectacularly, but for the NDP to then fumble it so thoroughly that the Liberals are somehow left as the only federal party left standing.

Possible? Sure. In politics, anything is. But likely? No. Mr. Rae is almost certainly correct to have reached the conclusion that while it’s entirely possible that the Tories will lose the next election, the victory will then go to Thomas Mulcair and the NDP. And if the Tories do win the next election, the logical party to eventually unseat them, in 2019 or later, remains the NDP first, the Liberals second. That’s why 2023 is the year Mr. Rae focused on as the earliest possible date of a Liberal return to power. That’s three elections from now — the soonest the NDP and Tories can both be expected to defeat themselves.

In 2023, Mr. Rae will be 75. He may have dismissed as “bullshit” suggestions that he was declining to run for the leadership due to age, but time is not on his side, or his party’s. His decision to withdraw from the running — or never get into it, more precisely — was correct.

But what a message it sends to anyone who might wish to throw their hat into the ring and run for the permanent leadership position. Even your own party’s current leader doesn’t think you have a shot until you lose two more elections. Given the traditional Liberal impatience with leaders who lose even a single election, is there anyone out there who’ll really see any value in running for a job that no one thinks will go anywhere until you’ve been publicly fired?

Alberta was awash in the latest polling numbers Wednesday morning, all showing a surge by the Wildrose Party, the arch-Conservatives gunning for the ruling Progressive Conservative party. If the Wildrose can keep their campaign up, the April 23 election could signal a historic shift away from the PCs, which has been the only game running in Alberta since hot pants.

The Calgary Herald/Edmonton Journal poll, which was conducted just before the writ dropped on March 26, found the two parties are in a dead heat, with momentum points to the Wildrose. According to the Herald:

“Campaigns matter, and this campaign is going to matter more than a campaign in Alberta in a very long time.”

Interestingly, the poll found premier Alison Redford was perceived to be the more competent than Wildrose’s Danielle Smith, although the latter was deemed more likeable. Edmonton appears to remain the only place in the province where the Tories still hold court.

The Sun News chain also released its polling data,which was conducted by Forum Research after the writ dropped. It reported the Wildrose surging ahead of the Tories. That data gave the upstarts a 10-point lead against the incumbent PCs, concurrent with a massive drop in Ms. Redford’s approval ratings. If that continues, the province is looking at a Wildrose majority government — holding to Alberta’s historic habit of sudden right-ward shifts.

Herald columnist Don Braid said the PC collapse evokes memories of ’71, when the Tories swept the long-standing Social Credit party. Although it’s probably too soon to be putting money on either leader — Wednesday is only the third day of the campaign — these results show the potential for an Alberta Spring.

A hat-tip to my colleague Kelly McParland for suggesting earlier this week that Stephen Harper and the Conservative government are not so much changing Canada as simply demonstrating how much Canada has moved away from the elite blueprint the Liberals began using 40 years ago. It was intended to socially engineer a new multicultural, bilingual, socially just nation in which government is omnipresent and policy is directed as much by special interests, crusading elites and activist judges as it is by Parliament and the people’s elected representatives.

For what it’s worth, I think Kelly’s right. The Tories aren’t undermining the Liberal vision of Canada, as their critics often worn in the direst terms. Canadians already beat the Tories to the punch. To the extent ordinary Canadians ever bought into the Trudeau/Chrétien worldview, most got over it years ago. Prime Minister Harper is merely removing the false idols Canada’s elites have erected to themselves, and their vision, over the past four decades. No hidden agenda, no altering Canada beyond recognition, no reducing our stature on the world stage — just a return to the solid middle that prevailed in Canada before the Grits attempted to remake us in their image.

Pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol is not an embarrassment to the nation, as the Liberals and NDP and every environmental group in the country has insisted. Kyoto was never going to prevent global warming or dangerous climate change. I disagree that man-made global warming or climate change are occurring, but even if you believe they are, Kyoto was never the answer, nor is whatever treaty will succeed it likely to be.

Kyoto applied to too few countries: No more than a couple dozen countries had agreed to meaningful emission reductions under the accord and almost none of them were likely to meet their targets except by accounting legerdemain.

Germany may be able to claim it will satisfy its Kyoto obligations, but it’s the fall of East Germany that made that possible: After the Communist bloc fell apart extremely dirty factories closed, slowly to be replaced by more efficient West German versions. That’s good, but it hardly requires the sacrifice Canada would have to agree to — in terms of jobs lost and economic potential squandered — to achieve the same “savings.”

The Harper government’s decision to withdraw from Kyoto was simply a pragmatic reaction to a reality the Liberals, the UN and much of the international community refuse to acknowledge.

Ditto the announcement last week by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty that the federal government would continue to increase its annual health-care transfers to the provinces by 6% a year until 2017. By that year, Ottawa will be shipping the provinces about $38-billion annually to help pay for doctors, nurses, hospitals and medical equipment. Thereafter, the increases would be tied to economic growth (currently about 4%), but will never fall below 3%, no matter how bad the economy gets.

But the Tory decision was simply a recognition that health care no longer needs to be a national icon. Canadians have moved on from defining our nation by its “free” health care. No matter how often politicians claim universal care is sacred and that all that is needed to preserve it is more money, waiting times get longer and health outcomes decline relative to the rest of the developed world. Canadians have given up believing our system is perfect, so the federal government realized that grand national first-ministers’ conferences filled with dramatic negotiations over intergovernmental funding are no longer needed, either. Here’s the money, take it or leave it, and move on.

The Tory decision to build more prisons is a recognition that 40 years of the every-boy-a-good-boy pop psychology approach to crime has failed, just as their initiative to make immigration and citizenship more meaningful is a recognition that multiculturalism has grown out of control.

Their new border agreement is not a radical sellout to the U.S., but rather a simple recognition that millions of Canadians and billions of Canadian goods cross the border weekly, so it makes sense to ease the process.

The Tories are not wreckers of the peaceable kingdom. Rather they are simply better at divining the radical centre than the other parties.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/lorne-gunter-the-tories-havent-changed-us/feed/0stdCanadian Prime Minister Harper shakes hands with fans before the start of play between Czech Republic and Canada at the 2012 IIHF U20 World Junior Hockey Championships in EdmontonLorne Gunter: Gun licences should go the way of the registryhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/lorne-gunter-gun-licences-should-go-the-way-of-the-registry
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/lorne-gunter-gun-licences-should-go-the-way-of-the-registry#commentsWed, 26 Oct 2011 00:15:05 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=55352

Last week, several victims’ rights groups banded together to declare that the federal Tory government wasn’t listening to them concerning the long-gun registry. That’s what people always say when someone else hears what they’re saying but continues to disagree with them — you’re not listening.

I’m quite certain the Tories have listened to the victims’ groups’ arguments in favour of retaining the registry. But as the introduction of Bill C-19 on Tuesday demonstrates, the government simply doesn’t buy the assertion that the registry is needed to cut crime.

There is no evidence whatsoever that in its 14 years of existence the registry has lowered Canada’s crime rate, so there is no reason to believe that retaining the federal database on long guns and their owners will ever prevent the violent crimes victims’ rights organization highlight.

Related

There is less gun crime in Canada than in 1998 when the registry opened its doors, but there was already less in 1998 than there had been in 1988, and less in 1988 than there had been in 1978.

The peak year for violent crime per capita in Canada was 1975. The rate has declined more or less steadily since then.

Gary Mauser, an emeritus professor at the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., says the same is true of licensing. The Tories aren’t planning to get rid of the requirement that all gun owners obtain a federal firearms licence, but they could. In his research over the past two decades, Prof. Mauser has found that while the murder rate went gone down 1% in the first decade after licensing became a requirement, it had gone down 9% in the decade before licensing.

Just as the Tories are getting rid of the registry, they could also do away with licensing without jeopardizing public safety. But putting an end to licensing will likely have to wait. The government seems intent on keeping it, if for no other reason than it enables them to say they are concerned about gun safety, it’s merely the expensive, useless gun registry they’re after.

Other statistics uncovered by Prof. Mauser also point to the uselessness of owner licensing.

Gun owners have long (and correctly) argued that registering guns is useless as a crime-fighting strategy because criminals don’t register their guns. So how could a registry possibly stop crime?

Preliminary findings from a study done by Prof. Mauser are pointing to similar conclusions about licensing.

According to statistics provided by the Library of Parliament and Statistic Canada, of the 7,720 homicides committed between 1997 (one year before the registry opened) and 2009, just 95 (1.25%) were committed with a firearm registered to the accused murderer, and only 151 (1.98%) were committed with a gun by a person who held a valid firearms licence.

In other words, just over 3% of Canadian homicides in the licensing era have been committed by licensed gun owners using guns – registered or otherwise – even though licensed owners make up about 8% of the population.

It’s a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. The 7,720 total is for all murders including those committed using knives, crowbars and fists, as well as guns, whereas Prof. Mauser’s analysis of murders committed by gun owners includes only murders in which a gun was the deadly weapon.

Still, the murder rate among gun owners using a gun is just 0.38 per 100,000 licensed owners, while the overall murder rate in Canada since 1997 has been about 1.85 per 100,000 population.

It may take several more months for Prof. Mauser to come up with a murder rate among licensed owners regardless of weapon or methodology, but it is hard to believe that licensed gun owners are wildly more murderous with other objects. So it is a pretty safe bet the general murder rate among licensed gun owners will turn out to be noticeably less than the murder rate for the general population.

The point is clear: Legal gun owners were among the people least likely to commit murder even before the government required then to acquire licenses. So owner licensing is every bit as pointless as gun registration.

On Tuesday night, parliamentarians elected a new executive committee for their Canada-Israel Friendship Group. There are several such groups, that work to strengthen the ties between Canada and assorted countries. Membership in the groups is entirely voluntary. Members of Parliament (whether sitting in the House or Senate) inclined to join elect their own leadership and pay a membership fee. It seems like rather inoffensive stuff — one outreach effort among many taken on by our federal officials. But it’s much darker than that, according to interim Liberal leader Bob Rae: It’s actually the latest front in the Conservative party’s ceaseless partisan warfare.

What has Mr. Rae up in arms is that the 60 or so parliamentarians that gathered on Tuesday to select the Canada-Israel Friendship Group’s executive committee only elected Tories. Is this yet another sign of Stephen Harper throwing his majority mandate weight around? Apparently not. It’s just that for every Liberal that attended the vote, 20 Conservatives showed up.

The actual numbers — about 60 Conservative MPs vs. three (3) Liberals — might go a long way toward explaining why it was only Tories that were elected to the committee: The pool of candidates was roughly 95% Conservative. But that didn’t stop Mr. Rae. “We’ve always operated in Parliament in the past [on the idea] that parliamentary friendship groups would operate on a non-partisan basis,” Mr. Rae said Wednesday. “These guys are ready to turn everything into a partisan issue.”

Having warm feelings towards Israel isn’t something that’s the sole purview of Conservatives. There are plenty of Liberal MPs that have been outspoken champions of the Jewish state and its right to self-defence, not to mention existence (and some Liberal MPs, including Mr. Rae, are members of the group even if they skipped the vote). But Mr. Rae cannot pretend to be outraged about losing out on a vote that only three Liberals felt the need to attend. If it matters so much to the leader, he should have seen to it than more that a trio of his MPs attended.

The ranks of the MIA include Mr. Rae himself, who could have shown up, but didn’t, along with 30 other Liberal MPs. There’s another 44 Liberals in the Senate. That’s 78 total Liberal parliamentarians, of whom only three were interested. Mr. Rae looks silly venting his frustration on those who actually did show up to support a vote that he clearly values enough to gripe about losing, if not quite enough to attend. Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, who did attend and vote, said that the party was having trouble communicating about the meeting, but in our electronic age, that’s hard to accept. The Liberals either chose not to attend or are suffering from far greater internal communications issues than are generally known.

Further, Mr. Rae’s comments bemoaning excessive Tory partisanship conflict with those of one of the Liberal MPs who did attend the vote — Marc Garneau. Mr. Garneau says he wishes that at least one Liberal had been elected to the executive committee, in the interests of “balance.” If the Liberals consider this a non-partisan event, then what would a lone Liberal member of the executive committee have been balancing? Mr. Garneau’s objections are self-evidently partisan in nature — he wanted his party to be represented, and it’s not. Does Mr. Rae consider Mr. Garneau’s comments a sign of the rabid partisanship of his own caucus?

Conservative MP David Sweet, newly elected chairman of the group, when contacted by phone, made clear that the invitation to attend the vote was sent not to members of any particular party but to Parliament as a whole — all 308 members of the House, regardless of their party affiliation. “Those who were interested found time to show,” he said. “You’d have to ask the Liberals why only three of their members did.” Indeed. And that would be an interesting point for Mr. Rae to address, once he’s finished blaming the Conservatives for putting more effort into a cause both parties claim to cherish.

Until this weekend, the debate amongst Alberta’s long-ruling Progressive Conservatives wasn’t if the party needed to change to survive, but how. By Saturday night, after votes had been tallied for the party’s leadership race to replace retiring premier Ed Stelmach, it was clear that change had already come. The contest isn’t over: the top three contenders — Gary Mar, Doug Horner and Alison Redford — will now spend the next two weeks running like Kenyan marathoners into the last stretch of the drawn-out race. But the results revealed a party clearly and profoundly transformed after four-and-a-half tumultuous years under Mr. Stelmach’s rule. And not for the better.

Not a single one of the three front-runners hail from the Conservative side of the Progressive Conservative tent. The 1992 race delivered the deficit-smashing Ralph Klein to the second ballot. The 2006 race, the reputedly neo-con Ted Morton, even if he didn’t win. When Tories gather once more on October 1 to make their final pick for premier, they will have to choose only between three Progressives. The Conservatives have been wiped out. Mr. Morton, five years ago, roared in with more than 25,000 votes on the first ballot, enough to carry him to a second; on Saturday, after rising as high as finance minister, he couldn’t quite scrape up 7,000. He had run this time as the only candidate who could bring home to the “mother ship” the alienated small c-conservatives who fled, under Mr. Stelmach, to the breakaway Wildrose party. His party, however, seemed uninterested. “Where is the far right?” Rick Orman, another blue Tory candidate, wondered aloud as the votes were counted. “This doesn’t look good for the future of the party.”

Truthfully, Mr. Morton had, over four months of official campaigning, given only uncertain hints that he might actually be able to deliver what he promised. In his years under Mr. Stelmach he had stood by his Premier as Mr. Stelmach ran deficits while fattening his Cabinet’s paycheques, attacked the oil patch, cancelled the province’s tradition of Senate elections, pandered to unions and weakened private property rights. Mr. Morton had all but disavowed his support for the Alberta Agenda, the 2001 manifesto signed with then-private citizen Stephen Harper and other Reform thinkers and sent to then-premier Klein, calling for the province to more vigorously flex its constitutional muscles. If Mr. Morton hadn’t somehow softened over the years as a minister in the Stelmach Cabinet, his cautious, middling and low-key campaign offered Tories, and wandering Wildrosers, little by way of proof to the contrary. Had he been able to lure the voters, nearly the same number, that went to Rick Orman — who, after being off the radar since serving as a minister under Don Getty, stormed in from the private sector like a fundamentalist firebrand preaching a return to conservatism — his campaign just might have had a shot.

Even put together, though, the two putative right-wingers would not have stood much chance in a party that showed, Saturday night, that it has finally succumbed to a takeover by its progressive wing. But whichever Tory candidate takes over, he or she will inherit a party not just redder, but significantly weaker. Fewer than 60,000 ballots were cast in this race. In 2006, it was nearly 100,000.

That number will rise, of course, by the second ballot, after the three front-runners have had fourteen days more to try and shake into Albertans some slightly heightened interest in this race. But not likely by much. The PCs have had a government monopoly for 40 years; this is, in effect, a contest to pick the man or woman who could rule the province for many years to come. And Albertans, even the former Tory faithful, have shown themselves scarcely interested, never mind excited. Even Mr. Mar conceded as much Saturday night. Despite dominating the race with more than 40% of the vote — Ms. Redford had 19% and Mr. Horner 15% — he declared that his “job” over the next two weeks would be “to get more people to vote” on the second ballot. Some ridings pulled in barely a couple hundred leadership votes. If this isn’t a sign of a political organization in decline, it’s hard to imagine what is.

This can be good news only for the PCs’ rivals, most of all Danielle Smith, leader of the right-wing Wildrose party. The PCs under Mr. Stelmach’s leadership have already driven off hordes of former conservative loyalists and the party will spend the next two weeks on a runoff process that can, by definition, only divide itself further. With such a commanding lead, the race is Mr. Mar’s to lose, though the preferential ballot process — which will allow supporters for the weakest of the top three candidates to throw their support to a second-choice — is designed to create upsets, as Mr. Stelmach’s victory from third-place demonstrated five years ago. But whomever triumphs will find themselves leading a party calling itself conservative but behaving as if it doesn’t know the meaning of the word. As Mr. Morton proved just this past weekend, that is hardly a formula for success.

The pyjama games are done, but the party has just begun. Or so the NDP seems to be thinking, amid much back-slapping over their weekend filibuster, which saw Parliamentarians quaffing Scotch and chomping pizza into the wee hours of Sunday morning, as they expounded on the pros and cons of back-to-work legislation in the Canada Post dispute.

For the left, the outcome represented a symbolic victory for the NDP, which “stood up to a bulldozer without getting crushed” as the Toronto Star’s Tim Harper put it. You would think that the party had actually won their fight, rather than merely forestalled the inevitable.

On the right, Prime Minister Stephen Harper correctly deemed the drama unnecessary. The tactic employed — the filibuster — was akin to whacking a fly with the proverbial hammer. Federally, the filibuster has traditionally been used for far weightier matters: the Nisga’a treaty in 1999, the design of the Canadian flag in 1964, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate in 1956, and the Reciprocity bill in 1911. Provincially, the Ontario NDP tried to filibuster the Progressive Conservative’s Toronto amalgamation bill in 1997.

If the NDP is going to stage a Parliamentary sit-in over the new government’s first confrontation with Big Labour, what will they do over the Tories’ tough on crime legislation? Or Senate reform? Or their 2012 budget? Canadians will soon tire of watching their politicians making bleary-eyed speeches at 2 in the morning. So expect more creative theatre: In his previous incarnation as a Toronto city councillor, Jack Layton pulled stunts, such as packing hundreds of homeless people into council chambers to declare homelessness a “national disaster.”

But don’t think Mr. Harper is too sorry about losing sleep this weekend: This new political polarization suits him and the Tories just fine. Canadians do not harbour scads of sympathy for Canada Post: Most private-sector workers do not enjoy job security, company pensions, and generous vacations. As of 2009, according to Statistics Canada, only 16% of private sector workers hold union memberships, in contrast to 71% of public sector workers. Overall, 29% of Canadian workers belong to a union.

The debate allowed the Conservatives to cleverly (and correctly) paint themselves as the defenders of the public interest. Sure, some mail was trickling through to people who depended on it, such as pension cheques to seniors. But many other groups, including small businesspeople, saw their cash flow dry up as their mailboxes went empty. Turns out snail mail does matter — and the government was right to put its foot down and send postal employees back to work.

Once Parliament resumes in the fall, expect the NDP to start pulling out more procedural stops to make their pro-labour points — and there will be many occasions to do so. As Treasury Board President Tony Clement searches for his cuts, the public service will start feeling the pain. The trimming has already started, but will have to go much further to find the $4 billion needed to bring down the deficit on schedule.

Will Ottawa turn into Wisconsin North? The NDP would likely relish a similar showdown, as will the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), whose president John Gordon predicts a “rocky road” based on initial consultations with the Treasury Board. As would the Conservatives. The new polarity neatly squeezes out their former rivals, the once-mighty Liberal Party of Canada. Interim leader Bob Rae can complain of “shambolism” all he wants, but the filibuster revealed a cold hard truth. Political polarization works for the left, it works for the right, and it is likely here to stay — at least for the next four years.

Gary Clement/National PostWhat’s the point of being a Hollywood star if you can’t snap your fingers and have free stuff delivered to you? (And this is something we imagine they do while supine, à la Barbara Cartland, by pulling a tasseled silk bell cord.) The ultimate in supreme laziness. That’s the premise, sort of, behind <a href="http://www.jsquared2pr.com/&quot; target="_blank">JSquared Public Relations'</a> third <strong>Bask-It Style’s TIFF lounge</strong>. Hotel partners discreetly gift their guests with the suite’s hefty bags o’ swag, nobody has to pose awkwardly and everybody's happy. Right?<!--more-->
T<strong>he Good: </strong>John Frieda’s arsenal of frizz-fighters (because whenever we pack his goopy serum in our luggage, it oozes all over everything, without fail). And there are not only books but, for the rare plucky celeb who drops by in person (if any do), their authors on hand to inscribe them. There’s DK’s guide to Toronto, Tish Cohen with a trio of her novels, Wayne Johnston’s just-published, Giller-nominated A World Elsewhere and Adrienne Kress’s The Girl Who Was on Fire, a compendium about The Hunger Games. “We found that basically having books in the lounge was very unique, the media loved it and we’ve had feedback,” exlains JSquared PR principal Jessica Glover. It makes sense to seed the books among Hollywood influencers of film option opportunities, especially considering that over a dozen TIFF films again this year are based on books.
<strong>The Bad:</strong> Still more premium bottled water. (see: <em><a href="http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/09/08/tiff-swag-hag-the-it-lounge/&quot; target="_blank"> IT Lounge, The</a></em>)
<strong>The Head-Scratcher:</strong> While the media and locals visiting surely appreciated gift certificates for Blo Blow-Dry Bar blowouts (say-that-ten-times-fast), we don’t think that just before a red carpet premiere or photo call is the right time for visiting celebs to be trying out a new stylist.

The Senate is held in such disrepute that senators never know whether to shout “present” or “not guilty,” according to an old Parliament Hill joke. The humour, such as it is, plays on the universally acknowledged lack of legitimacy in the Red Chamber.

Senators are appointed (in all but one case), rather than elected, and don’t even receive a democratic mandate from the provinces they claim to represent. The Conservative government has been trying to make the Senate more credible since it came to office in 2006 and is set to introduce two bills that would take baby steps toward a more representative 21st-century democracy. One bill would set out a process for Senate elections in the provinces; the other would limit a senator’s term to 10 to 12 years. As Postmedia News reported, the limit is likely to be raised from the Tories’ original proposal of eight years to 10 or 12, in order to secure Liberal support in the upper chamber.

Neither change would seem to cause a fundamental shift in Canada’s constitutional axis. There have been worries from some people about gridlock, if a predominantly elected Senate started to flex its muscles and challenge the supremacy of the Commons, in the same way the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate battle over turf. But, we either want reform or we don’t. Any move to modernize the Senate will inevitably increase the risk of conflict between the chambers. The upside is that a legitimized Senate would become a check on the discretion of a Prime Minister with a majority in the House.

Yet, typical of Canada’s designed-by-committee federation, the provinces see even these limited reforms as an infringement into their jurisdiction and are determined to throw sand in the gears. Quebec is threatening the Harper government with a trip to the Supreme Court to block any unilateral moves to reform the Senate. Pierre Moreau, the province’s intergovernmental affairs minister, warned any change must be done through a constitutional amendment, approved by at least seven provinces and 50% of the population. Camels will be passing through the eyes of needles before that happens.

Nova Scotia has indicated that the federal government shouldn’t make any changes unilaterally, and its NDP Premier Darrell Dexter favours abolishing the Senate, rather than holding elections. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty also called for the Senate’s abolition, upset that Ontario only has 25% of the seats and 40% of the country’s population. B.C. Premier Christy Clark said the Upper House has outlived its usefullness.

Yet, while all these provincial politicians claim to be speaking on behalf of their voters, they actually have no idea what the electorate thinks about the Senate. In fact, since Confederation, Canadians have never been consulted on the Senate.

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal thinks its high time they were. He has introduced a motion in the Senate for a referendum on Senate abolition, status quo or reform twice already and is set to do so again, even as the Harper government introduces its legislation (which he supports). Any such referendum would be advisory, rather than binding, but it would be hard for any provincial leader to ignore the democratic will, if it were expressed strongly enough. “I don’t know why anyone would be afraid to give Canadians a chance to have their say,” he said.

The federal government should embrace the proposal, even as it introduces its new legislation into the Senate. The prospect of voters backing the status quo seems remote — and if Canadians vote to kill the Senate, then so be it.

On the other hand, if the vote is for reform, it would bolster the federal government’s case and render hollow the constitutional objections of the provinces. There remains the prospect of different results in different regions, but democracy is seldom tidy and neatly packaged. The rules of the game would have to be clearly established before any referendum was held.

It seems a remarkably common sense way to facilitate real change, without charging into the quagmire of Constitutional reform. Still, as Senator Segal said: “Common sense is not a qualification for progress” when it comes to Senate reform.

Chris Wattie/Reuters FilesThe holiday season is a time to count one’s blessings. So as city staff attempt to balance an operating budget that must be no bigger than 2010’s, not raise property taxes, forgo revenue from the late, unlamented personal vehicle tax and include no “major” service cuts, I think we should all give thanks for a couple of simple facts: One, the budget shortfall, $503-million, isn’t all that daunting, relatively speaking; and two, it’s all pretty much on Rob Ford’s head.
Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. But last year at this time that number was $821-million; the year before that it was $679-million, with only $74-million in surplus to put against it. This year there’s a projected $281-million surplus. Subtract that from $503-million and add $64-million to get rid of the PVT, and we’re “only” something like $286-million in the hole.
Last week, both at the budget committee and at city council, left-leaning councillors peppered staff with questions designed to illustrate the Ford team’s budgetary bravado. In this they succeeded: Freezing property taxes wasn’t a campaign promise; there was no need for him to commit to it at all, let alone in advance of the budget-making process. But neither the City Manager nor the CFO fell to their knees, tearfully admitted there was no way in hell they could fulfill Mr. Ford’s lunatic demands and begged him to reconsider. Instead, they explained they’d balance the budget more or less the same way they always do.
<!--more-->City Hall still has sticky fingers, after all. It’s not like we’re living in some kind of “tax paradise,” as budget committee chair Mike Del Grande memorably put it this week, let alone a user fee paradise. The city plans to absorb $1.9-million extra from dinging property owners when the Fire Department goes out on false alarms. (Don’t worry: You can still burn to death for free.) Your garbage rates may go up by 3.5%, your water rates by a whopping 9%, and who knows what else.
(I’m pleased by this, incidentally. As a non-car-owning renter, neither the property tax freeze nor killing the PVT did anything for me. It’s schadenfreude in the bank!)
Then there are the efficiencies. For the better part of a year, we’ve been told there are none to be found, but of course there are. City Hall found them every single year of David Miller’s mayoralty — $102-million worth in 2009, for example. It was only when Mr. Ford proposed it as a proactive measure — why spend more money than you need to? — that people suddenly started framing it as an ignoble undertaking.
And how’s this for the bright side: We have a Mayor who’s explicitly committed not to cut services, even if it’s only for a year. You can doubt that commitment, or its feasibility, or both. You probably should. But as I say, it’s all on his head. Some might call it leadership.
Of course, it’s very early days. In 2007, after 23 councillors voted to defer the introduction of the personal vehicle and land transfer taxes, the normally fairly sanguine Mr. Miller went to the media and essentially freaked out on his own city. Because of these irresponsible buffoons, he said, the Sheppard subway would be closed and bus routes would be cut. And then, poof, he backed down, and we muddled through until the new revenue arrived, just like we always do.
Mr. Ford’s newfound equanimity will soon be put to the test, perhaps by staff who stubbornly refuse to make his subway plan add up or balance his budget without cutting services that some Torontonians consider “major” — and certainly, if that should come to pass, by upset citizens and salivating journalists. But these are Mr. Ford’s numbers; it’s his plan. If his campaign promises don’t hold water, not only will all Torontonians know who to call to complain. A remarkable number of them actually have his cell phone number.
National Post
cselley@nationalpost.com

Over the last five years, anyone inclined to rationalize Stephen Harper’s latest foray into decidedly non-conservative territory always had the minority government to point to. His hold on power was tenuous, one could say, so there were times he just had to choke down his principles and take action to protect his party’s station.

So, when David Emerson crossed the floor in 2006, it was only so B.C. could have an experienced voice at the Cabinet table. When the Conservatives created a regional slush fund — sorry, economic development agency — for southern Ontario in 2009, it was simply a way to shore up votes in a key area. And when he began appointing partisans to the Senate in 2009 — in big blue dollops — it was just so his government could ensure that House legislation wasn’t held up by an unelected body.

He didn’t like doing these things, you see, but they just had to be done. Couldn’t be helped. Hold your nose, look away, and await the day when this unpleasantness was no longer necessary.

That day was supposed to have arrived on May 3. But as Wednesday morning’s events in Ottawa have made brazenly clear, the Prime Minister is not about to do a damn thing differently. Those of us who thought he might? There’s a word for that: suckers.

Related

It’s not just that Mr. Harper decided to appoint three more unabashed partisans to the Senate. It’s not just that the Senators-to-be, Larry Smith, Fabian Manning, and Josée Verner, were rejected by Canadian voters only two weeks ago. And it’s not just that the PMO’s announcement of the appointments was seemingly timed to be as contemptuous of the public as possible — just after the new Cabinet was announced, and mere moments after the Prime Minister had completed a question-and-answer session with the media in Ottawa. It’s all of it, in one tidy package: more patronage, less respect for democracy and less accountability. He’s long since given up the pledge to only appoint “elected senators,” of course, but it takes some gumption to swallow all those principles at once.

Marjory LeBreton, the Senate government leader, defended the appointments — for the man who made them wasn’t around to explain them to the press — as part of the Conservative plan to reform the Upper House, which would include elections. But the government seemingly had control of the Senate. If it is serious about reform, it could get started on that particular can of constitutional worms right away, and if it ultimately found that it needed more numbers to implement its package, it could appoint more senators at that point. There is no other way to view Wednesday’s announcements other than that they are pillow-soft landing spots for Tory cronies who failed to land jobs on May 2.

But while the Senate appointments were a surprise, the Cabinet decisions were not. And yet they, too, were a further sign that Mr. Harper is not interested in taking his majority mandate and using it to make the kind of changes in government that he used to once advocate. A 39-member Cabinet, nearly the largest in the country’s history, for the party of small government. The same attention to petty worries such as regional balance — Quebec has four Cabinet members out of five MPs, while Alberta has four out of 27 MPs — means that Cabinet becomes ever more bloated. Had Mr. Harper wanted to signal serious change, he could have easily whacked a bunch of positions and returned the ministry to a more manageable, less costly size. Was it surprising that Mr. Harper did not celebrate his majority victory by essentially firing a dozen ministers and returning them to the back benches? No, it wasn’t. But the point is, he could have done so. It would have been a clear sign that, as conservatives wait for Conservatives to show any sign that they haven’t forgotten the meaning of the word, Mr. Harper intends to govern like the politician he must have once intended to be — back before he had the balancing act of a minority government to worry about.

Instead, the unwieldy Cabinet that we expected is the Cabinet we got. And then the Senate appointments as the exclamation point on the whole depressing spectacle.

It was believable, once, that it was unfair to judge Mr. Harper on his minority-government record. Sometimes a strong leader must choose pragmatism over principles.

But if this is the way the Prime Minister chooses to begin his majority rule, in one hypocritical, undemocratic, and unaccountable swoop, then there’s another conclusion to reach: maybe these are his principles.

Linda Duncan, the NDP candidate for Edmonton–Strathcona, has held on to her seat, spoiling the Conservative party’s hope of

National Post GraphicsClick on the image to view larger

painting Alberta a solid blue once again.

Ryan Hastman, the Conservative candidate, had been working the riding since 2009, with help from Alberta’s federal cabinet ministers, provincial Tories and prominent Wildrose Alliance MLAs behind him. He had advertised every anti-oilsands comment made by NDP leader Jack Layton and Ms. Duncan herself—she called the industry an “embarrassment” and called for a moratorium on new projects there—in hopes of feeding anger and angst in a city built on petroleum. But it wasn’t enough: Ms. Duncan dominated the night, running away with a nearly 6,000 vote lead over her Conservative rival.

Every other riding in the province appeared headed for easy Conservative victory, repeating the same results as the 2008 race, and the election before that one. Prime Minister Stephen Harper challenged Albertans during the campaign to paint their province blue, but was forced to settle for a carbon-copy of the election map the last time Albertans went to the polls.

The New Democrats’ surge appeared insufficient to take Edmonton–Centre and Edmonton–East from Conservative hands, as NDP strategists had dared to hope. But Jack Layton’s party made noteable gains in the province nonetheless: in 23 ridings, the NDP ran second to the Conservatives, leaving the Liberals in second place in just three Calgary ridings and no others, mirroring the Liberal collapse elsewhere in the country. Even independent candidate James Ford showed better than the Liberals (and the NDP) in Edmonton–Sherwood Park, a riding Conservative Tim Uppal nevertheless won handily.

But in Edmonton–Strathcona, Ms. Duncan—who benefitted too from the help of strategic voting Liberals and help from volunteers from around the province determined to beat the Tories—did more than hold a seat for her party. She changed the political dynamic in that riding. All expectations tonight were for a nailbiter like the 2008 election night when Ms. Duncan squeaked past Conservative Rahim Jaffer in a race so tight—she won by less than 500 votes—that Mr. Jaffer prematurely began to declare victory before realizing his mistake. Instead, Ms. Duncan turned Edmonton–Strathcona into an NDP playground, making it clear the riding has drifted as far from the Tory fold as ever.

National Post

klibin@nationalpost.com

On Twitter: @kevinlibin

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/battleground-alberta-tories-wary-of-ndps-edmonton-toehold/feed/1stdClick on the image to view largerIgnatieff wants to stay on as leaderhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/ignatieff-looks-to-help-liberals-win-back-old-seats
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/ignatieff-looks-to-help-liberals-win-back-old-seats#commentsSun, 01 May 2011 15:30:23 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=61943

By Althia Raj

AJAX, Ont. — Michael Ignatieff says he wants to remain Liberal leader no matter what happens on May 2, but it will be up to the party whether he stays.

Mr. Ignatieff said he wants to stay and fight another federal election.

“The Liberal party is a democratic institution, it’s a fact. I want to stay. I want to continue. I want to win this election on the second of May but my faith is not just in my hands. Hey folks, it’s in the hands of millions of Canadian voters out there,” he told reporters and supporters outside Liberal candidate Mark Holland’s office in a strip mall in Ajax, Ont.

“After the election, we see where we are,” Mr. Ignatieff said.

When asked directly whether he would commit to remain Liberal leader and fight the next federal election as leader no matter what the result of Monday’s vote, Mr. Ignatieff replied: “Yes!”

Mr. Ignatieff was on his final push Sunday, making whistle-stops in ridings the party feels are under threat of falling to Conservative hands and in other ridings they hope to win back from the Tories.

In Ajax Pickering riding, Holland is facing a tough challenge by the Conservatives’ star candidate, Chris Alexander, Canada’s former ambassador to Afghanistan.

Earlier, Mr. Ignatieff planted trees at the Bob Hunter Memorial Park in Markham, Ont., Sunday morning with his candidate in Oak Ridges-Markham, Lui Temelkovski. Temelkovski lost his seat in 2008 by 545 votes to the Tories’ Paul Calandra. It’s a rematch on Monday.

Wearing a white T-shirt with the logo of 10,000 Trees, the organization devoted to planting enough trees to join two forests into one in the park, Mr. Ignatieff dug and planted white cedars and white pines with a few young children. While stomping down the earth around one tree, Mr. Ignatieff cautioned the children not to stomp on Mr. Temelkovski.

“Stomp on Calandra,” he said.

Later Sunday afternoon, Mr. Ignatieff will be in Liberal incumbent Rob Oliphant’s riding of Don Valley West and Thornhill, a riding the Liberals lost in 2008 to broadcaster Peter Kent. Then he is off to the riding of Vaughan, which the Liberals lost in a recent byelection to Conservative Julian Fantino, a former Ontario Provincial Police commissioner.

Before attention shifts to the Royal wedding on Friday, party leaders will attempt to shore votes among a wiley electorate whose support — at least as far as public opinion polls are concerned — is concentrated in the Tory and NDP camps.

Conservative leader Stephen Harper has deployed his tour to southern Ontario and Quebec on Thursday, targeting Jack Layton’s party as his main opponent after admitting it is a “close election.”

Mr. Harper begins the day in Niagara Falls, campaigning with three Tory candidates, including Rob Nicholson, the Conservative government’s justice minister. The Tories are intent on staving off in Ontario the surge of NDP popularity that has mushroomed in provinces such as British Columbia and Quebec, where he will attend a rally on Thursday evening in Quebec City.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who enlisted former prime minister Jean Chretien to rouse the party’s base at a “Rise up for Canada” rally in Toronto on Wednesday, will be meeting with supporters and delivering speeches in La Belle Province, where he is looking to stave off a rising orange NDP tide in Montreal and Laval.

Mr. Layton — who has shot to within three points of the reigning Tories, according to one recent poll — will campaign in Yellowknife before joining a rally in Saskatoon, where his party is looking to pick up a seat.

In La Belle Province, Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe is looking to wrest back support from the surging NDP, traveling throughout Quebec and finishing off in Quebec City, where he will meet with supporters.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May is spending much of the day campaigning in her riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands, where she is in a fierce battle with Tory incumbent Gary Lunn.National Post, with files from Postmedia Newskcarlson@nationalpost.com

Royal Galipeau is 64 and he’s recently sprained his ankle. The Conservative MP for Ottawa-Orleans could be forgiven if he gave up chilly door-knocking and put his feet up in front of a warm fire. But this is the perfect time to campaign, he said. “People love to see politicians suffer. You get credit just for showing up.”

It’s sage advice -he’s likely going to need every vote he can get, if he is going to prevent Orleans from turning red again.

Much has been written about how the Conservative majority will be won or lost in the suburbs of Toronto.

But those Tories who know what’s really happening understand that the story in Ontario is not just going to be about adding to the win column. There are going to be losses too and they are going to make gaining a majority all the more difficult.

In particular, in Eastern Ontario, they are nervous about seats like Ottawa-Orleans and Glengarry-Prescott-Russellthat have large, traditionally Liberal, francophone minorities.

In Orleans, Mr. Galipeau is facing an energetic local lawyer, David Bertschi, and the evidence on the doorsteps is that this one is too close to call.

Walter Robinson, the former head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, lost narrowly when he ran for the Conservatives here in 2004. Despite speaking excellent French, he failed to win sufficient support among francophones, who count for 35% of the population.

Mr. Galipeau, whose roots in the riding go back four generations, built on Mr. Robinson’s efforts and won by 1,200 votes in 2006, increasing that to nearly 4,000 in 2008.

Mr. Robinson says it will be tight this time around. “The Liberals are hungry, they have a good candidate in Bertschi and a solid ground game. At the same time, Galipeau is more of a local MP than the Grits give him credit for,” he said.

Mr. Galipeau hasn’t made many waves in Parliament. He is probably best known for striding across the floor of the House of Commons and confronting David McGuinty by grabbing him, wagging a finger in his face and using “unparliamentary language,” after the Liberal MP accused him of not defending francophone rights. Yet, the response on the doorstep is warm. One lady, whom the Galipeau team had listed as “unfriendly,” said this time she will take a lawn sign.

As he wanders from door-todoor, he makes the pitch that he is the Conservative candidate but between elections he is everyone’s MP -an old-fashioned constituency MP whose phone number is still in the book. “It’s frustrating if an MP is remote. I’m not remote -I pick up my own phone,” he said.

Still, the Liberal sense that this is a winnable riding is such that Michael Ignatieff visited to give the Bertschi campaign a boost. After all, 25% of all federal public servants in Ottawa live in Orleans and many are unhappy with the Tories’ perceived abuse of the bureaucracy. One woman at the doorstep told Mr. Bertschi she will be voting Liberal but didn’t want a lawn sign because she worked for the federal government and was worried about retribution.

Mr. Bertschi is highly critical of Mr. Galipeau’s performance in Parliament on the doorsteps. He says in five years he has never put forward a private member’s bill (though the Conservative MP did introduce a motion proposing a National Tree Day this year) and has “caved like a cheap suitcase” when it comes to fighting for infrastructure spending and jobs in Orleans. His pitch is that the riding has been underrepresented and government jobs are “heading west -and I mean west of Ottawa, not Alberta.”

Mr. Bertschi, the son of a Swiss-German immigrant father, is a rookie candidate but learns quickly. On this chilly afternoon, he is campaigning with Ontario government minister Madeleine Meilleur, who is the MPP in neighbouring Ottawa-Vanier. As he jogs from door to door, she offers some advice. “When there is an animal -you talk to the animal first. We all love our pets,” she said. At the next door, Mr. Bertschi spends time chatting up a large Newfoundland dog, before trying to extract a vote from its owner.

As Mr. Robinson found out to his cost, Ottawa-Orleans is a riding that tends to go the way government goes, which is good news for Mr. Galipeau. But in this splintered election, it would surprise no one if the Conservative wave toward majority foundered on the rocks of the francophone ridings east and west of the nation’s capital.

That is certainly Mr. Bertschi’s goal, as he enters his 20th month of racing from door to door. “This is my third pair of running shoes,” he said, before sprinting off to meet another potential convert.

Just one day after Bruce Carson returned to his job in the Prime Minister’s Office in early 2009, the controversial government aide was caught in a potential conflict of interest, letters released Wednesday night show.

Stuart Gradon/Postmedia NewsBruce Carson was convicted of five counts of fraud in the 1980s before taking up a position in the PMO in 2006.

Within 24 hours of returning to the PMO, Mr. Carson’s name was attached to a letter sent to the federal deputy minister of natural resources, lobbying the government on behalf of his former academic paymasters at the Canada School for Energy.

The news comes from two letters sent by Guy Giorno, Stephen Harper’s chief of staff at the time, to the office of the federal conflict of interest and ethics commissioner in January 2009, and released by the PMO this week.

The information in the letters raises new questions about what Mr. Harper and the PMO knew about Mr. Carson and when they were first made aware of it.

The PMO called in the Mounties last month to investigate Mr. Carson in response to allegations raised in media reports that he illegally lobbied the government in 2010. The allegations stem from a water filtration contract awarded to a company that employed Mr. Carson’s 22-year-old girlfriend, a former escort.

Mr. Harper has said that he was aware of incidents 30 years ago, but wasn’t aware of more recent incidents until they were raised.

Mr. Carson was convicted of five counts of fraud in the 1980s before taking up a position in the PMO in 2006.

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Mr. Harper has said he was only aware that Mr. Carson had been in prison once.

Mr. Carson returned to work for the PMO on Jan. 5, 2009, after taking an unpaid leave of absence from his job as executive director for the Canada School of Energy and Environment at the University of Calgary.

On Jan. 6 — one day after returning to the PMO as an adviser — Mr. Carson’s name was attached to an email sent to the deputy minister of natural resources. The letter came from Mr. Carson’s Canada School email address.

“The subject of the email was an application that the Canada School intended to make under the Government’s Networks of Centres of Excellence program,” said the Jan. 23, 2009 letter from Mr. Giorno to the ethics commissioner.

In his letter, Mr. Giorno wrote that Mr. Carson told him “the email was drafted before he had returned to the Prime Minister’s Office but apparently was mistakenly not sent until after his return to the PMO.” An email correcting the mistake was sent to the deputy minister’s office on Jan. 12.

In an email on Jan. 10, according to records the Conservatives released, Mr. Giorno wrote to Privy Council clerk Kevin Lynch that he needed advice on how to deal with the matter, including “reporting to the prime minister.”

On Wednesday night, the Conservative party campaign didn’t say whether Mr. Harper was formally or informally made aware that his chief of staff had concerns about Mr. Carson.

When asked why the letters were being released, campaign spokesman Chris Day said, “Our government is committed to accountability and transparency.”

A look at the state of the campaign Monday, as the party leaders mostly hunkered down to practise their debating skills while dealing with an ever-changing scandal landscape:

DEBATE BINGO

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POLL POSITIONS

The four main federal party leaders head into Tuesday night’s debate with Conservative leader Stephen Harper still viewed as the candidate who would make the best prime minister, according to the results of an exclusive poll for Postmedia News and Global National. The poll, conducted by Ipsos Reid and released Monday, show Mr. Harper leads as the candidate who would make the best prime minister, with 47% of respondents agreeing with this statement. That compares to 35% who feel NDP leader Jack Layton would make the best leader; Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff trails with 19%. The numbers are almost unchanged from late March. Darrell Bricker, president of Ipsos Reid said, “People have made up their minds on a lot of these issues and they just aren’t moving.” That, however, was before Monday’s leak of a draft report about G8 summit spending by the Auditor General. Ipsos Reid polled a sample of 1,020 adults from its Canadian online panel. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics and political composition to reflect that of the adult population according to Census data. A telephone survey of this nature would have an estimated margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Results available at Ipsos.ca. Robert Hiltz, Postmedia News

NDP TO SENATORS: SHOO!

Senators should not be able to campaign for political parties while still collecting their public salaries, charged the New Democrats Monday. “All these senators are campaigning on the public dime and it is unacceptable,” said the NDP’s Olivia Chow at the launch of the “Saw-a-Senator” campaign. The party is urging the public to take photos and report “unwanted” senators campaigning in their ridings. Ms. Chow said this practice, although not illegal, is unfair because taxpayers’ dollars should not be used to pay for senators to campaign on behalf of their specific parties. Linda Nguyen, Postmedia News

OTTAWA — The Conservatives will release their platform on Friday in Toronto, setting the stage for their leader, Stephen Harper, to provide more detail to voters about what the party would do with the majority mandate it seeks.

Harper will be at the campaign event where the platform is released, said the Tories’ national campaign chairman, Guy Giorno.

The move comes just one day before the two-week mark of the campaign, and several days before next week’s crucial televised leaders debates.

“The platform has to come out at some point,” Giorno said in an interview. “This is the point in the campaign we thought was the appropriate time to lay it out for the voters.”

It is expected that the platform will highlight the measures that the Conservatives proposed in their recent budget that was tabled before the government was defeated in the Commons. However, Harper has also been promising new initiatives along the campaign trail — such as income splitting for families with children so they can save on taxes, and doubling the allowable contributions to Tax Free Savings Accounts.

Those promises, and more — such as a plan to end public subsidies for political parties — will also be in the platform.

Three of the other parties — the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, and Greens — have released their platforms already.